Louder but not worse?

[Hans Moleman]

I've got a short film that's nearing completion, except for one minor gripe: one actor is unbearably quiet in comparison to the others. Now, I have isolated his dialogue, and in Audition I bumped it up, and did a noise removal, but now I'm hearing it louder with a really hollow and almost reverb-y sound to it. Any fixes?

 

[Haydn]

The problem you are hearing could be simply the effect of increasing the volume of a quiet recording, do you know why this actor was quiet ?
If it was because the microphone was facing the wrong direction - it may have picked up more reverb and less direct vocal sound than the mics on the other actors - which could have the effect you describe.

Or... perhaps the hollow/reverby sound is a result of the imperfection of the noise reduction. There is no perfect noise reduction so it is always a question of compromising, reducing noise unfortunately degrades quality

If the hollow/reverb was not there before you applied noise reduction, the best solution may be to try some different methods of noise reduction, or a different approach to using the noise reduction in Audition.

If you were to post a short clip of the audio, Im sure people could offer some advice about what has gone wrong & how to try and fix it.

Disclaimer : I may not actually know what Im talking about

 

[Noiz2]

NR plugins can cause what you are talking about. You can try to start over and do multiple passes with less NR in the passes. This sometimes will have a less derogatory effect on the sound you want. You could also use a compressor expander plug like the Elemental Audio one to pull out low level BG while boosting slightly higher level dialog.

But it's hard.
SK